Artist Spotlight // girl in red

girl in redrepresents a new strain of millennial indie/lo-fi artists coming into their own in 2018. The 19-year-old Norwegian musician’s online presence is at once effortless and masterful. All lower case titles, vintage photograph Bandcamp visuals, an outdated camcorder footage music video – the overall aesthetic is a kind of beautifully orchestrated apathy, and the music that it accompanies couldn’t be more fitting.

Her latest release, Chapter 1, is a collection of melancholy songs that capture the anxieties, excitements, and revelations of queer youth. Driving percussion, shimmering, dreamy guitars, and saccharine vocal melodies coalesce in a body of work that feels simultaneously modern and nostalgic as if the songs have been pulled from the future to reminisce upon the present.

From existential dread to heartache, to sexual exploration and discovery, there’s a confessional vulnerability to girl in red’s lyrical content that’s easy to fall in love with. She says what she means and means what she says, an artistic value that when put into the larger context of indie rock. proves powerfully subversive.